And with this, I am free!

Well, almost free - but as far as I'm concerned, just turning in projects and an informal presentation is not considered real work.

For digital painting, were were asked to take one of our favorite/best digital paintings and fix it up for another critique. If you look down, you can see the original Venice picture. This one I cleaned the edges up, colorized bits and pieces of it, then layered two sheets of textured/colored paper. The final effect is beyond awesome, a case of pure luck/intuition unfortunately.

It will be entered in the Center for New Media end-of-the-year Art Hop.

(I might get a full poster made too ^.^ - it is 11x16)

Edit 5/4/10: The piece was accepted into the May 7th Art Hop. I'll be able to go to this show and see it lose personally, lol.

Final Project of the Damned

As I mentioned in the last post, this is the final project for both Digital Painting and Graphic Design in a 800ish point death-a-thon. It utilizes just about every program I have: Corel Painter, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. And my patience.

The illustrations were created in Painter using the oil pastels, then a filter placed on top to give it the grainy effect. The cover was colored in Photoshop. The glowy logo (it says "Gestalt" btw) was created in Illustrator. The inside spread is a series of complicated layers and modifying layer attributes in Photoshop. For the blood, I used the same process designated for cleaning up line drawings. It worked surprisingly well, and I didn't have to clean up around the spatters and hope they turned out. Which shaves off a ton of time.


The biggest downside to the spread is that the text does not extend all the way to the bottom of the page to be flush with the rest of the text.

The short story, "Empty Twilight", is something I wrote last summer for my Creative Writing class. It is the story of three boys who wander into an abandoned complex to find a forbidden object, freeing themselves of bullying from the older kids.




I'm not sure if the story is going to be legible for everyone, since the quality was reduced for web. The text is super small on a large resolution screen. If anyone is interested, I can always post a .pdf version or maybe a higher res image.

Non-Existent Events - BE THERE

Hello again friends, and salutations from a brain that is completely fried. I just finished up the last of my work for Digital Painting and Graphic Design this semester in a giant all-in-one project (posted later).

I wanted to post an assignment we did a week or so ago, an event poster. Everything on the poster is (obviously) hand lettered and hand drawn. Except for those stupid stars. I really liked doing the hand lettering, since it gives a unique effect and it hard to replicate with a font. I'm thinking about creating more 'fake' posters over the summer, maybe even making it a specialty. Next time I will utilize the ruler a bit more - it looked neater on paper, but when it was blown up on the computer it looked horrible.

Threadless Submission - McYogsothoth

I submitted my first t-shirt design to threadless (www.threadless.com) which has a badass arrangement of t-shirts. I don't expect poor Cthulhu to make it to print, but it's the experience that counts... Okay, so I'm a bit more upset that it will be pummeled into the ground - but getting a tshirt printed one day is a goal to aspire to!

Go see it here: http://www.threadless.com/submission/267305/McYogsothoth

EDIT: The scoring for McYogsothoth ended a few days ago, and it scored a 2.33/5. That doesn't seem like a super high score, but its pretty good for Threadless (remember, people can score it a 1 on a whim or slight dislike). I would like to enter a few more just for laughs this summer.

Some random stuff...

I just wanted to put up some other assignments I liked from my digital painting class. The black and white painting was done in Corel Painter using the acrylic brush. It's my take on the Venetian carnival masks. If you've never seen the pictures, go google it right now. I'd like to do a color oil of them one day.

















The second poster is from my Shakespeare poster assignment about my favorite play "Much Ado About Nothing". I modeled the characters after the movie (the one with Dr. Wilson ^.^). In the play, Hero and Dr. Wilson's relationship is all puppies and rainbows, and its generally annoying as hell. But Beatrice and Benedick are hilarious and much more realistic. Go see it if you have the chance! The picture was traced in Adobe Illustrator, and then textures applied in
Photoshop.

My freakin' "tour de force"

This last week was a sort of 'finals' week for my ceramic class. Monday (the 5th) is our last day for for wet clay, with the next month spent on glazing and the Raku ceremony. We were allowed to do just about anything we wanted, whether it be thrown, slab, coil or sculpted. I really wanted to do a series of masks, but the piece had to support itself. I couldn't do the greek-Medusa thing, since the sculpture would really need some serious armatures, and nothing but pure clay is allowed in the kiln

And then I knew.

It was time to pay my tithe to the Art Gods - for every art student regardless of focus and age, will make at least one piece featuring a dragon. It is the inevitable law of the universe.


The base was constructed of two separate pieces coiled on a flat base. when the pieces were leather-hard, I cut the bottom piece out so I could fit in the slanted 'rock'. I cut it a bit too far, leaving that jankety opening. For support, two 'pillars' were fitted inside the lower piece to support the top. The end look resembles the inside of a cave.

The body was sculpted out of solid clay and later hollowed. I placed the body on top of the rock and patched the numerous amount of cracks. Two different heads were sculpted (the first too big). The legs are nearly solid clay, which means it will twelve years before this is perfectly dry.

Everything turned out how I wanted - except for the wings. I wasn't allowed to use wire to support and sculpt the wings. I tried to support them using a cardboard base, but they would be too thin and kept cracking. The end result is a weird set of abstract wings. It works, but they're too small for the body.



Regardless, the end result is a badass dragon. Now one more picture for posterity - since it is going to blow up in the kiln.

I think I just asphyxiated on paint fumes...

After over a month working on this painting, its finally at that stage where I can't care any longer. Sure, there are always more things to do - the gray suit guy's grin isn't shit-eating enough, and the girl could always a boob reduction and smaller eyes. Oh, and her glove is all fuxed up. Anatomy, anatomy, anatomy. And the newspaper looks odd as hell, and should be tinted a -- yeah, this can go on for quite some time.

The best part is the painting tells a wonderful story - in class I enjoyed the stories people created for these three. I think the guy in green was supposed to be a Jewish gangsta robot from the future. It's destined to be a hopeful entry for KVCC's Art Show next week. I hope to god the oil can dry in time - it needs a week, and it has two days.

I forgot my witty title...